Abstract
Much scholarship in recent years has encouraged us to focus our attention on how empire was constitutive to the making of Britain. In other words, such imperatives have invited us to engage with geographies which have always existed alongside each other, ‘conjoined’ by the umbilical cord connecting both metropole and colony.1 It would seem that the subject of the empire within has even begun to permeate the discourse of popular journalism, evidenced most recently in Jeremy Paxman’s Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British which appears, however tokenistically, to explore what effects this far- flung global history might have had on the makeup of Britain at ‘home ’.2 Yet despite such shifts, there still remains a surprising disconnect in the availability of a body of historically contextualized and materially grounded interpretative work to shift the orthodoxies of the institutional, pedagogical, disciplinary and social changes such directives ideally imply.
‘Only connect.’
E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910
‘The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.’
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972
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Notes
Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. xii.
also see Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds.), At Home in the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) for a broad review of current debates.
Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
C. L Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
and Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
This is discussed further in Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, and Susheila Nasta, ‘“Voyaging In”: Colonialism and Migration’, in The Cambridge History of Modern Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 563–85.
Bill Schwarz and Rachel Gilmour (eds.), End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 5.
Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, in Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 48–9.
For a fuller discussion of the implications of this ending between E. M. Forster and writer Mulk Raj Anand, see: Susheila Nasta, ‘Between Bloomsbury and Gandhi? The Background to the Publication and Reception of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable’, in Books Without Borders: Perspectives from South Asia, ed. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 160–3.
Tanika Sarkar, Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), p. 5. Sukanya Bannerjee also develops a similar argument in Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late- Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 27–31.
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© 2013 Susheila Nasta
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Nasta, S. (2013). Introduction. In: Nasta, S. (eds) India in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_1
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